Tani Adewumi gets required IM norm!

Tani Adewumi earned his fourth IM norm at the Southwest Open in Irving, Texas (outside of Dallas) last weekend. It was his first in an open tournament. Due to rule changes each player is required to have at least one of their GM/IM title norms earned in an open tournament. This reduces the chance of match-fixing and arranging dubious round robin events. Nevertheless, Tani has now earned the coveted norms and will continue hunting for GM norms.

Tani scored wins over GMs Emilio Cordova of Peru and Koustav Chatterjee of India and has made steady progress since receiving national attention back in 2019. Perhaps the first significant stepping stone was when he became a National Master back in May of 2021. A year later he earned the FM title. Tani went on to earn IM norms successively in April 2022 (New York), July 2022 (New York) and November 2022 (New York).

This last norm completes the norm requirements and he only has to get his FIDE rating over 2400. His peak rating is 2317 (March 2023), but rebounding from a year of inconsistent results to vault back over 2300. Getting the required FIDE rating is a challenge, but one bit of advice may be not to engage in counting points but to focus only on earning GM norms. If he continues to score (at a minumum) IM-level performances, the rating mountain will be scaled quickly. Following is an excerpt from the announcement on uschess.org.

Entering the tournament with a FIDE rating of 2280, Tani is still short the 2400 rating threshold for achieving his IM title. But, on the back of this performance, he has once again crossed 2300 in the live ratings while defeating two GMs and an IM on the way to a 5½/9 score. Fittingly, this result was also good for a share of the Under-2300 prize, which might be the last one of those he sees for a while.

~US Chess (JJ Lang)
FM Tanitoluwa “Tani” Adewumi (2280-USA)
# Player ELO Nation
Flag
Result
1 Aiden Leong 1936 Canada
1
2 GM Dambasuren Batsuren 2522 Mongolia
½
3 GM Emilio Cordova 2561 Peru
1
4 GM Koustav Chatterjee 2537 India
1
5 GM John Michael Burke 2582 USA
0
6 GM Cristhian Cruz 2498 Peru
0
7 IM Jason Wang 2453 USA
½
8 IM Tianqi Wang 2358 USA
1
9 IM Emil Stefanov 2530 Bulgaria
½
Score: 5½-3½ IM NORM)

Following are his two wins over Grandmasters:

Result: https://chessevents.com/event/southwestclass/2024/standings/master

2 Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *


Back to top button